D: We have some severe time and space restrictions today because there’s 25 records to examine and I only brought four beers.
C: [disbelieving] I told you all week.
D: Yes, well. We’ll have to be efficient and precise, like the German defense.
C: Always with the soccer metaphors when he’s supposed to bring the beer.
D: [looks at stack of CDs] Hmm, I like this pitch. [smiles broadly, uncaps a Foster’s] Come on man! It’s time for kickoff.

MARVIN GAYEThe Real Thing: In Performance, 1964-1981 DVD
(Hip-O/Motown/etc)
D: Marvin Gaye, the sweetpeacelovevibetenormaster of all time.
C: Sometimes things really are essential, and this nine-dollar DVD is one of those times. Or things. Anyways, the reason I’ve been watching this all week long is pretty obvious. There’s nobody like Marvin, no one even close; it’s a blessing just to watch him lip synch.
D: [grabs DVD case] Give me that. Especially when it’s Marvin duetting with Tammi Terrell at something called “Swinging Sounds of Expo 67,” singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in a futuristic phone booth under a plastic dome with a people mover going by in the background.
C: Look at those Dentyne smiles. It’s like a commerical for some future utopia where they are the fertility king and queen.
D: [thoughtfully] A world where you’re not afraid to have a baby
C: Hey, you’ll like this: the a capella option lets you hear Marvin singing in the shower.
D: No it doesn’t.
C: Okay it’s actually just isolated studio tracks. Beautiful. He really can make you swoon with just a voice and a snapped finger. That’s all he needed.
D: Very efficient.
C: “War is not the answer/for only love can conquer hate… we’ve go to find a way/to get some understanding here today”—man, if you sing that today, you’re called a master of the obvious, and yet maybe it’s only a lovesinger who can bring the super-commentary that lasts. He reminds us there’s better things to do with our time.
D: [musing] Lovers and poets make the best peace advocates.
C: This is footage from the film Save the Children—
D: —which should be released on DVD immediately—
C: —which includes live renditions of “What’s Going On/What’s Happening Brother” from a 1972 concert where they did the whole album, and you get Marvin at the piano and the legendary James Jamerson on bass guitar.
D: [sipping beer] Unbelievable. Total butterland.
C: Total ethnographic film of Black America in the early ‘70s: broken windowed skylines and gang grafitti, soul food joints and black pride bookstores, men in dashikis, women in flares and kids in corduroys with spaghetti on their faces, street basketball and barbecue, balloons and checker pants and sweaters.
D: Excellent fashion!
C: He sings like his voice is a horn—and his voice actually has the grain of one. So amazing. Plus there’s multiple appearances on the Dinah Shore show—[notices puzzled D]—that was an afternoon TV show for bored housewives back in the ‘70s.
D: That was the time before they started making all the women work all the time too, in addition to the men. What happened?
C: [ignoring] He talks about What’s Goin On: “I don’t recall much about making it. I feel it was very personal, very divine. I don’t hardly remember writing the songs, it was like I was in some sort of other dimension when we did it, so I know it was a very spiritual.” We could spend weeks talking about everything on here: the polyester jumpsuit future-Chic-soul-P-funk—
D: Somewhere The Juan Maclean is crying.
C: —about getting down on the moon with floor fog that is the promotional video for “A Funky Space Reincarnation”— “COME ON BABY, let’s go peace loving and check out this new smoke/Naw this thing I got, it ain’t classified as dope/Smoke I got from Venus/Have had it all week, it’s getting old/come on and try this new thing with me baby….”
D: This song is my new national anthem.
C: And your new wardrobe, if the world is lucky.

GNARLS BARKLEYSt. Elsewhere
(Downtown)
C: This is a collab concept duo album by two geniuses-in-progress: Dangermouse, the guy who did the Beatles/Jay-Z album-length bootleg mashup, and Cee-Lo, the short guy from Goodie Mob with the voice and the lyrics and the concepts. Goodie Mob, those guys were part of that Georgia crew in the ‘90s, all of them interesting—Goodie and the Dungeon Family and Organized Noize and Outkast and Witchdoctor and Cool Breeze—
D: Who had a dream, he was in a place called Butter.
C: Here’s something bonehad obvious: this song “Crazy” is the song of the year—very apropos for these times, in so many ways that [looking at D opening his second Foster’s] we have no time to count. Three seconds and you’re hooked, three minutes and you’re done and ready to begin again. [looking at promotional photo] These guys are total half-bus refugees.
D: The revenge of the nerds is neverending. [listening to the song’s music] Somewhere, The Juan Maclean are crying another tear, alongside N.E.R.D. [repeating lyrics] “I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind/There was something so pleasant about that place/Even your emotions had an echo, and so much space/And when you’re out there ,without care, yeah I was out of touch/but it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough/I just knew too much/Does that make me crazy?” Whew. I’ve been to that place—I think I lost my mind there too once.
C: [laughs] Once?
D: [glares] SILENCE in the lower ranks!

RUFUS HARLEYSustain
(Discograph)
C: Philadelphian bagpipe-playing long-ago jazz dude with new studio record. Coltrane indebted. Whoa that’s a nice double-deep in the pocket beat underneath the drone on the second track. It’s weird how the bagpipe drone works, immediately.
D: It’s dronetime once again.
C: Sometimes I’m not sure he’s playing the same song as his band—
D: [singing that Gnarls Barkley song] Mayyyybe he’s crazy?
C: —which, according to these liner notes, includes his son Messiah, one of 17 kids?!? Is that right?
D: Could it be a misprint?
C: What, he had 1.7 kids? That’d be hard to do, then again it might not be hard for a guy that plays bagpipes in 7/4.

THE BLACK KEYSChulahoma
(Fat Possum)
D: I am very happy sitting in front of this speaker.
C: This is the Black Keys doing six Junior Kimbrough songs.
D: One thing’s for sure: Junior had a lot of riffs.
C: One other thing’s for sure: Junior had a lot of kids. 36, to be exact.
D: [The Black Keys’ singer-guitarist] Dan Auerbach is not one of them.
C: Not that we know of. But yeah, it is uncanny how his guitar tone, style and voice can all echo Junior’s so much—on “Have Mercy On Me” at first I thought it was Junior. Who knows why what pops up where. As they say in Africa, the wind blows the seeds. Nice to hear the Keys branching out on the track, by the way, with the organ and tabla—it’s a good sound for them. And that knotty riff.
D: Wasn’t Robert Plant gonna join these guys on bass?
C: He didn’t make the cut. Re: Zeppelin, it should be said: the guitar does have that tone and bottomlinenastiness that Jimmy Page could get sometimes. So good. Great, varied drums from P. Carney, his best work yet. And here comes another long snaking moan riff.
D: Junior’s music wasn’t done evolving, even if he’s gone.

EAGLES OF DEATH METALDeath by Sexy
(Downtown)
C: Another supergroup, featuring Jesse Hughes and his boomerang of love, plus Josh Homme.
D: Unlike the Raconteurs, this group knows what it’s doing.
C: And what it is doing is very simple: retarded Rolling Stones riffs that you can go-go to.
D: This music encourages sexual tendencies and is proud of it.

FUTURE PIGEONFuture Pigeon
(RecordCollection)
C: Very nicely done modern retro-dub from the Arthur office favorites, with guestwork from Ranking Joe, Mikey Dread, Ras Congo, the Scientist. You can’t argue with a band that uses a six-foot-long papier mache electric doobie—with smoke machine and lights—as its onstage prop.

THE AGGROLITESThe Aggrolites
(Hellcat/Epitaph)
C: Very nicely done retro rocksteady, with just the right amount of grit and spit, from members of bands I don’t usually care about.
D: A pleasant shockah.

THE FIERY FURNACESBitter Tea
(Fat Possum)
C: Our favorite geniuses. Some may say this is the record they’ll be remembered by, but I say this is just them scraping the gravy off the ground. The endless Disneyland Electrical Parade keyboard squigglery and backmasked vocals and whatnot sure sounds to me this is a band trying to stay ahead in the weirdness sweepstakes.
D: [smugly] It’s not nearly as weird as Gnarls Barkley, and not nearly as good. And I bet you they know it.
C: Don’t they know competition is so 20th century? The key is to listen to the album in reverse order, last track first. That way you’ll listen to all of it, and you’ll be sure to hear the best song, “Whistle Rhapsody?”, which is also one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard.

ESPERSII
(Drag City)
C: Okay, this is sadder.
D: I like these Espers. I sense naked hippies dancing around the maypole. After dark. Drinking the stuff from the milk of the frogs… [closes eyes]
C: It does have a certain Sandy Denny/Pentangle quality. I bet they get tagged with the New Wave of Ren Faire thing, but I bet they wouldn’t be caught dead at that party—they’re gloomy gusses and sad-lifed maidens who’d rather be in the woods than the castle, anyway. I’m speaking metaphorically of course.
D: [continuing, rhapsodic] Or they they may be playing in that town called ‘Machine’ in Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Which featues Robert Mitchum in his last performance. [opens eyes, smiles] One of this nation’s finest weedsmokers.

JOSEPHINE FOSTERA Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
(Locust Music)
C: Okay, this is even sadder.
D: An American woman singing all 18th or 19th century German folk songs for children, in German, is the personification of melancholy. It might not be the right music to listen to when you’re deciding whether to live or die, deep at night in those grey hours.
C: As Marvin would say, That’s not livin’! But it sure is singing. Absolutely beautiful.

SCOTT WALKERThe Drift
(4AD/Beggars)
D: Excellent art-rock that doesn’t rock from a living legend, but I’m afraid this music encourages morbid tendencies. This is immense, this record. But what is it? The mood somehow implies a seriousness that might not have to do with worldly events. It is religious? spiritual? There is an urgency! Dreadstorms coming. I think of Japanese ghost music…
C: We’re running out of time, D. I think this is one we’ll have to come back to next time.
D: At least we let the people know that the mighty Scott Walker has returned.

FRED NEILFred Neil
(Water)
D: The great freckled Greenwich Village folk soul who wrote “Everybody’s Talkin’,” which Nilsson had a top ten hit with in 1969 off the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack.
C: [puts on “That’s The Bag I’m In”] Check out the morning he’s having: “toast was cold and the orange juice was hot.” There’s so much soul in his singing, this is an album for the dinosaurs.
D: Not the dinosaurs man, the dolphins!
C: It’s true, these are songs for the dolphins. Seriously.

BELONGOctober Language
(CarPark)
C: I’ve been let down by NASA, what with the militarization of space and all, but this gives me some insight as to what it feels like to be launched into space. Beautifully fluttered and static-drenched, like those between-song passages of Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine.
D: [blissed out]
C: [blissed out]

BORISPink
(Southern Lord)
C: Okay. One more beer, we’ll split it. This is the new Boris, the co-ed heavy guitar sludge march trio from Japan who in the last year have dropped the overt Melvins moves and become a band of varied powers—
D: [Stands on couch with bepuzzled-in-happy-way face] Majestic dry ice fog riffage that can’t be turned any louder!
C: A landmark record, a virtual catalog of extreme rock guitar strategy—Godflesh/Jesu ethereal rings and reversed dread, overdriven High Rise-style rhythms, post-Sonic Youth squall, Kim Thayil-style tone, Grand Funk/Montrose laying-it-out-there vocals—all on the first two songs. I don’t know if any of that makes sense but I’m trying to give people a general idea.
D: Unbelievable, neighborhood-destroying pummel drumming here [on title track].
C: [listening to ‘Woman on the Screen”] Wow. Reminds me of really, really good Nirvana-style punk/grunge, only somehow much huger.
D: [listening to “Blackout”] A mighty behemoth from the Far East is throwing mountains!
C: I think we are all in agreeance. Rock album of the year so far, easy.
D: [Dancing to “Electric”] You can lose fingers to this album.

HOWLIN RAINHowlin Rain
(Birdman)
C: One last supergroup: Howlin Rain, which is Moloney from Sunburned Hand of the Man on drums and Ethan Miller from Comets on Fire on vocals and guitar, working out their common interest in that seemingly lost-forever continent of great 1968-1973 American rock ‘n’ roll, when the hippies went back to the land and kept on rocking until the Man pulled all but a few back into his lame grip. Allmann Brothers, Creedence, Grateful Dead, Neil Young…
D: I sense benificent Jerry Garcia vibes coming from smiling visage of Ethan.
C: He is singing at the edge of his capability like Jerry —it’s a high, roasted voice. But, curcially, not shrieking. He sings like he’s losing his throat. One of those guys whose vocals get quieter the louder he sings. He’s got the goner’s high moan.
D: Like that guy in Canned Heat. [listening to “Calling Lightning With a Scythe”] Or Faces-time Rod Stewart. [laughs] I call this album Another Side of Ethan Miller, Workingman Rock Star.

The story is not uncommon: someone—too old to have done so accidentally, too young to have known any better—creates something truly great but panics at the burden of what that greatness means. As singer, guitarist and producer for My Bloody Valentine, Kevin Shields was instrumental in defining the sound of a generation. Breathy vocal washes clashed with brittle walls of noise on the band’s two classic albums, Isn’t Anything (1988) and Loveless (1991), and though MBV’s dense, otherworldly sound was described as “dreampop” or “shoegazer,” it was always meant to conjure up much more imaginative spaces. “When you hear something and you don’t know where it’s beginning or ending, suddenly your imagination is fifty percent of what’s happening,” Shields explains. “The person listening is playing a huge role in what they’re perceiving, cause they’re allowing that part of their mind to be open.”

Saddled with the enormous expectations that Loveless brought, the shy, nerdish Shields seemed to dissolve into thin air. Was he apprehended by his own legendary perfectionism, sitting alone behind a console of knobs and sounds, striving for something unimaginably pure and beautiful? Had he soured from music altogether, or were the rumors about his drum-n-bass obsession true? Or, had he lost himself in the logical end of his hyper-inward music and found retreat in his own mind? The rare moments he would appear as an onstage guest or as a remixer only added to his disheveled legend.

In 1997, Shields joined bratty Scottish rockers Primal Scream and though he still remained reclusive, he at least seemed alive and well. This year, Shields contributed several new tracks to the soundtrack of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and he’s in the midst of remastering and re-releasing two discs of My Bloody Valentine rarities. Disarmingly charming, Shields sat down with Arthur and a plate of fries to talk about all of it.

Arthur: Can you describe your childhood?Kevin Shields: I was born in New York, in Queens. I grew up in Long Island (until I was ten) in this place called Commack, your typical suburb-y kind of whatever, and I went to this horrible school called Christ the King—an absolute nightmare, I’m still suffering the scars from that! Then we moved to Ireland—my parents were from there originally. They had immigrated when they were young, they were teenagers (and) they just wanted to come to America. Then they wound up with five kids in the early ’70s and they decided to go back to Ireland.

Were your folks pretty Americanized at that point?
My dad became an American citizen, he was quite Americanized because he’d spent thirteen years or something here. He spent his whole young adult life in America. I lived here ‘til I was ten, so I had the same upbringing as any American. You see the same TV shows and Godzilla movies and read Eerie and Creepy and worry about evil kids with B.B. guns.

Was there culture shock when you got to Ireland?
Mmm, yeah. That was in 1973 and America was truly about 20 years ahead of the rest of the world. In some ways, Europe had things that were more…like they had the glam rock movement. I remember that summer here (in America) it was Three Dog Night—they were the big popular bands with the kids…at school it was that or people were into Led Zeppelin or whatever. Then we got to England and it was Wizard and Slade and Sweet and all these guys in makeup. That was quite radical, that was a huge inspiration to me. In the first few weeks of being in the country, I was already obsessed with pop music. I was always into music—even in America we had our own little fake band, playing cushions and miming.

What inspired you about glam? The theatrics?
There was a whole style of producing that music that was really quite otherworldly at the time. They all used the double-tracking vocal effect and big slap-back on the drums and everything was slightly mutated-sounding. It was all very John Lennon-ized, nearly all the glam records had that double-tracked effect. Suzi Quatro had this song called “Cat on the Can” or something and there were bits where she was screaming with the double-tracked vocals and I remember as a kid believing that she was really doing that with her voice and just thinking, “These people are amazing!” and my brother going, “No it’s all studio trickery” and I was just going, “No it’s not, it’s all real they’re really doing it!”

And so you started playing music around this time?
I started playing guitar when I was 16. I was asked specifically to play guitar to be in this punk band. I hadn’t really thought about guitar so much; I was thinking of bass the summer before. I was basically told, “If you get a guitar you can join the band.” So I got a guitar for Christmas and joined the band. We did our first gig six months later doing Sex Pistols, Ramones, Motorhead…those kinds of songs. That band broke up by the end of that year and we were in this classic post-punky Joy Division-kind-of…actually quite like The Rapture. Weirdly enough, our ‘81 band was insanely similar [giggles] ‘cause that was the thing that was going on then, everyone playing sorta-funky bass, play the guitar with an echo unit—but use the echo unit in a percussive way—and you’ve got this singer who does this thing over the top… that was what was going on then. I spent all of that ‘81-‘82 period being in that world somewhere between Joy Division and…not Gang of Four, I wasn’t really that into them myself. And then from there we just went to doing this Birthday Party/Cramps thing in 1983. Einsturzende Neubauten were a big influence. I got a (Tascam) Portastudio and the first My Bloody Valentine was based around the Portastudio, making tapes at home and then playing them and then jamming over the top of them live.

So you would jam over your own rhythm tracks?
Not drums….we would just have drone-y sounds, weird sounds. Colm [O’Ciosoig, who is still in the band] would drum and I’d play guitar and Dave [Conway, who is not] would sing.

In The Story of Creation, the video about Creation Records [see Endnote 1] that came about ten years ago, Alan McGee jokes about seeing My Bloody Valentine for the first time in the mid-1980s and describing you as a “crap anorak band”—is this the period he was referencing?
Oh, that came a bit later. That came in ‘86. We moved from the Cramps to…I discovered the Byrds and a lot of the British bands that were into that light sort of thing. But all of them, whenever they would play live, it was always quite tough. It wasn’t quite that Talulah Gosh…what do you call it?

“C-86”? [2]
Yes, it was like a real twee thing came out. But around ‘85 and early-‘86 in London…I went to see Primal Scream and they were in their very Byrds-y kind of…but really loud and very aggressive version of it. Not noisy, but hard. Not angry, but a fuck-you attitude. That was kind of cool. Then we went through our shit anorak/indie phase. All our lyrics and live gigs at the time were always quite intense. We had a concept—we used to pick very harsh frequencies on the guitar and make them really loud and people would be like “Oooh,” but we had these haircuts and sparkly tops. It was too conceptual, basically, which is why it was kinda not very good. It wasn’t until Dave left that we relaxed a bit and stopped being so conceptual. We were still crap for another six months but then we suddenly got good. We just dropped the concepts and did music in a more generalized way.

Do you remember the moment when you finally thought you were good? Did you suddenly just think, “Wow, we’re good!”
Yeah. Literally yeah! [Smiles] It was literally one moment to the next. We were touring and Alan McGee had seen us the year before and didn’t really like us and then he saw us again and was really surprised at how we’d changed. He was like, “Would you guys be interested in making a record?” He gave us four or five days studio time, we recorded five tracks, mixed them and just went “Shit. This is good, actually, for a change!” We realized something. It was good because we were letting ourselves be more Sonic Youth-y, more of our influences in a way. And somehow out of that came an original quality. And I think it was just the relaxing quality of it.

Which five songs were these?
You Made Me Realise (originally issued in 1988 on Creation). That was the EP we made after doing the gig with Biff Bang Pow! [3]

You once said “Johnny Ramone’s playing on ‘Leave Home’ is somewhere between stupid and genius. Johnny Ramone was the first guitarist who blew me away—he showed me that maybe I could do something with the guitar…After getting into the Ramones, my attitude became one of using that guitar as simply a noise generator. I didn’t have any ambition to learn the guitar; I just wanted to generate noise like he did.”
Oh that “stupid/genius” thing! I’m so embarrassed by that… But yeah, the Ramones for me were THE revelation. I was into punk but in Britain punk wasn’t such a huge leap…even though it was invented in New York it couldn’t be absorbed culturally in the ‘70s in America. Whereas in Britain—since we’d had all the glam rock bands, which in a way was kind of punky—the punk bands were immediately on TV. The Buzzcocks were always on TV, every band you would read about you would see on TV every week. Punk rock was a mainstream event from the very beginning. It wasn’t an underground thing, even though if you were a punk rock kid you would risk being beaten up, but as a musical thing it was quite mainstream…So I was into all that but then I saw a video for two Ramones songs. And suddenly I understood. This was in 1978. Suddenly I realized he wasn’t playing guitar—he was generating the sound. He was doing what he had to do to make that, but there was no “playing guitar” involved. My ultimate hated image was the ‘70s rock guy just whittling away [strikes pose of consternated guitarist tapping fingerboard] with his too-tight trousers.

So the noise generator—did it influence how you practiced?
I actually consciously didn’t want to learn how to play anything other than the two basic bar chords, so I just learned the two positions Johnny Ramone used and that was it. I absolutely didn’t want to become a guitarist in the traditional sense. In ‘81 this bass player came on the scene and he was basically playing funky, strange bass-lines…melodically it was impossible to play a chord with it. So suddenly I couldn’t play. So I would find a note and then another note and I played a very fractured style. And then I did these percussive things and I suppose that’s when I left that attitude of generating a noise, and I only really came back to it around the time of the Isn’t Anything period because the way I played the tremolo arm…it only sounds good if you have quite a clear track. If you have a lot of overdubs it actually doesn’t sound good, so you can only do it with one main, good sound, and it has to be really loud to hear properly. So I came back to that stage of cranking sound like this. [Pretends to strum while gripping the tremolo arm]. As opposed to playing guitar I was just cranking the sound. And that’s what happened—that’s the Ramones connection. What I did that was any good in the end came from the mentality that Johnny wasn’t playing guitar. Even though now I’ve learned that he was playing a lot more than I thought.

You also said something in that video where you describe My Bloody Valentine as having this “fluff on the needle” sound where things are a bit dulled rather than bright. You described it as music you had to look into, as opposed to coming out at you. [4]
Well yeah. In the ‘80s the production values got to the point where every record was basically: really loud snare drum with a lot of reverb on it, the guitars were clear and separated. It was kind of…it was…your imagination didn’t play a big role in what you were hearing. When you hear something and you don’t know where it’s beginning or ending, suddenly your imagination is 50 percent of what’s happening. So the person listening is playing a huge role in what they’re perceiving, cause they’re allowing that part of their mind to be open. But if you give something to somebody in a way that says this is where it begins and this is where it ends, people go, “Okay, now what?” Whereas, if you don’t say anything people start to think…it’s like if you were to see the brain in a brain scan, it’s moving differently. So by blurring the edges—or not trying to make them clear, cause people go through an awful lot of effort to make that really clear sound—basically it just made the person listening to the music half the experience. I think what the ‘80s were about was killing that. What we were doing was reintroducing it. I think that mentality was very popular in the ‘60s—Phil Spector’s approach, a lot of the Stones’ records were quite grungy, a lot of the Beatles stuff…all the best popular music of that era, there was a lot of depth to it. It just disappeared into this horrible flat…bass exists here, snare drum is here, bass drum is very clicky there. It was, I suppose, a really right-wing way of making music in a way. It was very, this is right and that is wrong.

Do you keep tabs on My Bloody Valentine’s legacy?
I think the main thing is, in Britain and Europe because of dance music, a lot of things we did got discovered by themselves. People in the dance world discovered the pitch wheel and learned how to use it. There’s millions of dance records that, if they came out in ‘92 or ‘93, people would say they just ripped us off. And now people know they’re not ripping us off, it’s just that people have discovered the pitch wheel and they’re experimenting with it. There’s this great hit by Royksopp and it’s all “byuuuu” [makes high-pitched drop sound], it’s all twisted and melted. But it’s not from us, you know? It’s just because it had to get discovered—that’s human nature to go, “What does this do?” and then do it to every possible thing. Continue reading →

BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT have been invited to MY BLOODY VALENTINE ‘s curated event of the United Kingdom’s All Tomorrow’s Parties!
A first performance for BBML in France, the French Transmusicales Festival kindly invites BBML in December!
Expansive European Tour Dates Announced!

BBML Announce A New Collection Of Artists For The Band
Nico Turner & Jenean Farris of LA’s underground duo Voices Voices & Danielle Stech Homsy of Rio En Medio have musically joined BBML for this 2009 multi-nation journey.
The quartet are currently deep in Pueblo country, visioning & getting musical. Danielle has sat in with BBML during their early spring shows in the American South, as well as the April 2009 Denver & Seattle shows opening for My Bloody Valentine.

Other BBML News
Recent 2009 autumn shows included Shineywater with a new BBML backing band opening for HOPE SANDOVAL & THE WARM INVENTIONS both in San Francisco & in Humboldt County. BBML would like to honor Linnea Vedder-Shults & Danielle Stech Homsy for their musicality & fun fun fun travels.
Missing from the usual line up is long time pianist Rachael Hughes, who is adventuring in technicolor in an emerald forest of Northern California. Usual trombonist & vibraphonist, Santa Cruz’s Matthew Davis is currently playing trombone in a Chicago broadway musical. BBML’s touring singer & harpist Meara O’Reilly is rumored to be working on visuals for a video for Bjork & playing shows as Avocet. Gypsy artist & drummer Tommy Rouse has been working with bands White Magic & Celebration around the East Coast USA. Recent thanks to Otto Hauser for joining BBML in some shows around New York City & Brooklyn.

Another glamorously doomed blues serenade, with a rare chord change, from Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions’ forthcoming second album, Through the Devil Softly, out in late September from the good people at Nettwerk Records.